The Plantation Plot

Artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Asli Çavusoglu, Bakudapan Food Study Group, Minia Biabiany, Chang Yoong Chia, Cian Dayrit, Inauk Gullah, Taloi Havini, Izat Arif, Minstrel Kuik, Kuo Ju Ping, Catriona Maddocks and Gindung McFeddy Simon, Corey McCorkle, Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Diane Severin Nguyen, Pratchaya Phinthong, Nguyen Phuong Linh, Noara Quintana, Gogularajaan Rajendran, Joydeb Roaja, Khvay Samnang, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Tay Mo-Leong, Santiago Yahuarcani, Yong Mun Sen, and Connie Zheng.

The exhibition, curated by Lim Sheau Yun, assembles the work of twenty-seven artists and collectives who emerged in the wake of the proliferation of the plantation. Drawing from Jamaican critic Sylvia Wynter, the exhibition refigures the plantation plot in its co-constituting meaning of story and place, grounding the exhibition in the context of Southeast Asia but addressing a global condition. Attending to the affective modes birthed, damaged, and arbitrated by plantations and their (non-) logics, “The Plantation Plot” is retrospective, anticipating a future yet to arrive.

At the heart of the plantation plot were growth, progress, and an open market, where monocrop commodities were planted with zeal and circulated freely across the globe. Plantations were the engine of European imperial expansion, where cash crops were produced for export and through which empires accumulated surplus wealth. Over six hundred years later, we are still trapped in the plantation plot’s spellbinding reality. The plantation has not merely persisted; it is multiplying under our noses. Today, in Indonesia and Malaysia, crucibles of contemporary plantation logic, millions of hectares of forests and farmland have been cleared to plant oil palm.